We’ve had some cold snaps here, creating a bit of ice on the lake, but today the temperature truly drops with the arrival of the much hyped polar vortex.
I keep thinking about the swans – this winter is the first time I’ve seen swans here in our harbour.
While kayaking in the summer, I’d noticed a little island full of them over by The Spit – not quite in the harbour but adjacent, over in the wildland park area.
It looks lovely in their spot over there – sandy and green and very few signs of humans, so I’m not sure why this one pair has come to take up residence in the noise and grit of the harbour proper – it doesn’t look very hospitable.
When I first learned or noticed that swans stick around all winter, was back in the days when I was going up to Georgian Bay on the regular, getting out of the city and into nature, and getting to know my first digital camera.
Up there I saw that even as the temperatures plummeted and the water became filled with huge chunks of ice, the swans endured, floating quietly through the cold winter months. What impenetrable layers they must have, I thought, thinking of the thick layers of fat on a duck and imagining something like that underneath all the pretty white feathers.
The sense of this kind of obdurate toughness has been coming up repeatedly in the ongoing saga of my dad’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.
Over the holidays his partner of the last twenty-five years died. It had been coming for a long time and yet in the end happened very quickly, I think catching my dad off guard as he himself has had such a rough year health-wise and is the elder of the two.
Sad times.
Since my dad has been living for some months in a retirement home, we have begun the process of packing up the condo where they lived, and are in and out with boxes and bags, figuring out how to deal with all the stuff of a life.
The other day my brother and I got deep into it with the doorman of their condo building, discussing their dealings with the ongoing issues with the plumbing and renovations, and he said to us, “If I had to go to war, I would want those two with me – they were so stubborn…”. And there was something about the way he said it and what he didn’t quite say that implied a kind of “Okay, sure they’re gay, but… those two homosexuals are some tough motherf***ers.”
Underneath all the pretty white feathers…
Lens Artists Challenge – Resilience
follow your nose 